Around the world, governments and businesses face a conundrum: high levels of youth unemployment and a shortage of job seekers with critical skills. How can a country successfully move its young people from education to employment? What are the challenges? Which interventions work? How can these be…

“The quality of artistry is the capacity to assume innocence at will, the quality of experiencing innocence as if for the first time,” he says. “Do you believe that Rostropovich was playing a cello just for a living? Do you believe that Hendrix was playing for money?”

In Fripp’s view, a narrow focus on sales turns the artist into an automaton. “The greater the success, the greater the pressure to keep repeating yourself,” he says. When I point out that the music industry couldn’t survive by being anti-music, that it exists precisely to bring his and other musicians’ songs to as wide an audience as possible, he demurs. Since the late 1960s, when the likes of King Crimson were given the creative space to do whatever they wanted, it has, he claims, “moved from a symbiotic relationship to a parasitic relationship”. - Robert Fripp

Spanish scientists publish a study claiming that pop music is becoming less varied

The UN Security Council has unanimously approved Kofi Annan’s plan for ending violence in Syria, in a rare show of international unity over how to address the crisis. The statement approving the Annan plan was supported by both Russia and China on

Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output? From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revel...

Welcome to our annual guide to the businesses that matter most, the ones whose innovations are having an impact across their industries and our culture. Click a company name to view the entry, or determine your own ranking of the top four companies using a series of quizzes, games, and brainteasers.

"History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. We may reasonably expect that in the future, as in the past, some new states will rise, some old states will subside, that new civilizations will begin with pasture and agriculture, expand into commerce and industry, and luxuriate in finance." - Will & Ariel Durant

Cognitive Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneer in the study of hemispheric (left vs. right brain) specialization describes "the Interpreter" - a left hemisphere function that organizes our memories into plausible stories. Less romantic, perhaps, than Gone With the Wind, the Interpreter may he...